Immortality is a long shot, I admit. But somebody has to be first.

- Bill Cosby

Mr Tuniak sent me an SMS yesterday. It said: “I hope you don't have any objections against a quick trip tomorrow.”

Of course not!

I sent him an answer and today we were meeting not at his office, but at the parking lot of the building. And – as I had expected – we were going to the little cabin in the woods again.

“I've mentioned Philip a few times already, haven't I?”, Mr Tuniak said during the drive. “I guess you have questions about him...”

“Is he a time traveller like you?”

“No”, Mr Tuniak denied. “He's just been living for a very long time. Oh, and when you meet him, just call him Philip. He changes his last name every fifty years or so. I don't know what he's calling himself at the moment.”

We arrived at the cabin.

This time we did not travel through time. I was disappointed at first, but by now I should have learned to wait before judging. If you want to know why it is possible to use a time machine to travel to every point in the world, take a look at the note at the end of this post. It's not important right now.

Mr Tuniak did not tell me where we were going. He only said that we would stay in the present. Therefore, I was waiting excitedly for the moment the door would open.

Again the incoming air was the first sign that we had changed our position. But this time it was not warm, but cold, ice cold. I closed my jacket, but that only helped a little. Mr Tuniak opened a cupboard and took out two greatcoats.

“Put it on, we have a few metres to walk”, he said.

We were at the foot of a long row of mountains. The wind was blowing snow down at us, the sky was clouded and behind the time machine I could see lights in the distance. Probably a city. We walked towards a stone house, a lot smaller than the cabin in which the time machine had been hidden. The front door was more like a gate made out of dark wood. The name “Shangri-La” was cut into it. But when you got closer, you could see that the letters were actually men and women, wearing clothes from different time periods. They were surrounded by various symbols, which, although familiar, I couldn't really identify.

“What is that?”, I asked.

“A club house”, Mr Tuniak answered with a smile.

He opened the door and we entered a big anteroom. It acted like an air lock between the cold outside world and the warm inside. Here we left our coats and put on warm slippers. Another door was opened, one that led further inside. A small man with dark hair and a full beard greeted us.

“Hi, Lex!”, he said and they shook hands. Then he turned to me. “Hello! I'm Philip.”

He led us into the next... well I guess I have to call it a room, although it was bigger than any other room I've ever been in. It was definitely too big to fit into the building we just entered, which at first puzzled me. But then I remembered that the back side of the house had connected with the rock face right behind it. We were actually standing inside a cave now, although it never felt like one.

There was light everywhere and no two lamps or chandeliers looked the same. There were no walls. Instead shelves parted the room into several areas. I don't know how many areas, but in a way it felt as if I had just entered an infinite labyrinth.

But the shelves were not the only thing substituting for walls. There were several fish tanks as well – some of them in place of walls, but some also as part of the floor or the ceiling. The floor tanks were filled with warm water, so they doubled as floor heating as well.

“The big advantage of Iceland”, Philip explained, when I asked him where he got the necessary energy from. “Hot springs.” He led us to a seating area that was framed on two sides by fish tanks and by a shelf on the third. He asked, if we wanted tea or coffee and then disappeared.

I couldn't sit still while waiting for his return, so I got up and went closer to the shelf. It looked like it came out of a museum. A messy museum. There were coins from Victorian England, fire stones from the Stone Ages, then a paper back from the 1950ies next to a figurine from China... and so on. There were things from seemingly every country and every century.

“Was is that?”, I asked.

“Souvenirs”, Mr Tuniak answered. “They have been to a lot of places.” Earlier he had described this place as a “club house” so “they” must be the other people besides Philip who came to this place.

I went to the fish tank. The only animals inside were very small jelly fish, no more than a centimetre in diameter.

“Turritopsis nutricula, the Immortal Jellyfish”, someone said. I turned around and saw that a woman had joined us. Similarly to Philip, I couldn't guess her age, but she didn't seem to be over forty. “They develop from a polyp and they can turn back into one. An endless circle. Immortality. The perfect symbol for our little club here. I'm Eshe.” She sat down next to Mr Tuniak. “Hello, Lex!”

Philip returned, carrying coffee, tea and biscuits on a tablet. Then we started to talk about the real reason for our visit here.

“Lex told me that you were writing his biography”, Philip said. “I guess you want me to tell you about the first time I met his mothers, right?”

“The pyramids really should be finished by now”, Miriam complained. “They've been working for how long? Eighteen years? Nineteen?”

She and Helen were sitting on folding chairs on top of a dune. They were too far away from the construction site to be seen from there, but they had brought binoculars. This way they could watch the workers without fear of being spotted themselves.

“They look a bit like ants from here”, Helen said, ignoring the complaint. They had spent the last few days watching the construction of the pyramids. Thanks to their time machine they could watch the workers for a while and then jump several years ahead to see how far they had come. It was a bit like a time lapse effect.

“One last time to see them being finished and then you can choose our next destination, ok?”, Helen said.

But when they returned to their time machine they found an unexpected surprise. A man was standing right in front of it. “What is that thing?”, he asked, unable to hide his astonishment.

“I had been watching them for some time”, Philip explained. “I saw them appear every few years without changing. They always looked the same. At first I thought that I had found someone like me.”

“Someone like you?”, I asked. The answer I suspected was so incredible that I didn't want to say it out loud.

“You didn't tell him...?”, Philip asked Mr Tuniak.

“No”, Mr Tuniak answered. “Just hinted at it.”

Philip laughed cheerfully for a moment. “You really should have gone to the theatre”, he said before turning back to me. “I'm immortal. My earliest memories are... well, me doing a cave painting.”

I looked from him to Mr Tuniak, who nodded in confirmation. Then I looked at Eshe. “The earliest thing I remember is running after a mammoth”, she said.

“How is that possible?”, I asked. I never doubted the truth of their statements, not for a moment.

Philip answered: “I'm not sure myself, but I have a theory.”

“What do you think?”, Philip asked.

Doctor Blackburn took another look at the test results. “They are most probably a child's cells”, she said. “You see that here? Those are telomeres. Each time a cell divides a small part of it gets cut off.”

“So... the older someone is, the shorter their tele... telomeres are?”, Philip asked. “And when they're gone, the cell can't divide any more?”

“Yes.” The way Doctor Blackburn answered made it clear, that it was a very simplified answer, but that it would suffice for now. The longer explanation would have to wait for another time. “They are the reason why we age. Theoretically, if you found a way to renew them, you could live forever.”

“And because these telomeres here still have their original length, they must come from a child. Thank you, doctor.” Philip never told her that the cells she had been examining, had been his own.

“At first I thought I was the only one”, Philip said. “But then I met Esh'. And later others as well.”

“And all the stuff collected here... it all belonged to you?”, I asked.

“Yes”, Eshe said. “This house here is our refuge. We come here to find a little peace. To rest. To prepare for our next identity.”

“Your next identity?”

“You have to change who you are from time to time if you live as long as we do”, Philip explained. “That was easier in the past. You just had to walk to the next village, claim you came from somewhere far away and start a new life. Today you need passports and papers and stuff like that. It gets quite annoying sometimes.”

“Don't act as if you don't like it”, Mr Tuniak said. “You like to disguise yourself. You should have gone to the theatre.”

“I did that in Ancient Rome for a while”, Philip admitted.

“He's great in changing his appearance”, Mr Tuniak continued. “A new hair cut, walking slightly differently, maybe starting a new diet... Sometimes even I don't recognize him.”

“Well, I've had a lot of time to practice.”

On our way home Mr Tuniak explained the importance of Philip in his and his mother's lives. “He helped us a lot. You could say that he was the only constant we had. No matter where we went, he was there.”

“But how do you find him?”, I asked.

“In about fifty years he will meet my mothers and give them a list with all the places he has been to and when he went there.”

“How many immortals are there?”

“I don't know”, Mr Tuniak admitted. “Philip shares the house with eight others. You are still shivering. Are you cold?”

“Yes, a bit.”

“Don't worry. Next week we will go to the tropics”, he promised.

Why can one use a time machine to travel around the globe? It is actually very important that a time machine does not only travel through time, but also through space. Imagine that you want to travel twenty-four hours into the past. If your time machine couldn't travel through space, you would land in... well, space. Because twenty-four hours ago the Earth was somewhere else. And it's not only the Earth that travels. The solar system does as well and the Milky Way and everything else. So a little trip from one point of the Earth to another is actually quite simple for a time machine.

Mr Tuniak explained that you also had to take care of angular velocity, impulse and other things, but that's what the computer of the time machine was for.

NEXT WEEK

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